Davis's fight is not just for liberty. It is for Britain's soul

In defending 800 years of hard-won political rights, this rebel is also standing up for a crucial part of the national spirit

All comments (2)

• Jan Morris
• The Guardian,
• Wednesday June 25, 2008
• Article history

Whether David Davis makes of himself a public hero or a popular buffoon by his plunge into notoriety, he stands for me as an allegorical monitor of our times.

His behaviour has been quixotic, but like the great mad progenitor of the condition, Don Quixote of La Mancha, he is fighting a cause in a truly fateful battle - a battle for liberty of the human spirit.

It is not just a matter of those 42 days, of habeas corpus or even of human rights in the political sense of the phrase: it is an elemental struggle that is dividing the British again into two nations, as Benjamin Disraeli saw them long ago. They are in vulnerable condition anyway, their natural resistance weakened - all in a mess, demoralised, lacking confidence and conviction, enervated by failure and alien principles, swept this way and that by the forces of a rotten materialist culture.

And of the contemporary two nations, it seems to me, by far the greater is giving up on liberty. Anyone can see that in Britain, 2008, individuality is being suppressed, so that

year by year, generation by generation, the people are being bullied or brainwashed into docile conformity. What is more ominous is that so many want to be docile. They want to be supervised, cosseted, homogenised, obedient.

The ubiquitous CCTV cameras are the emblems of this malaise, not because of their existence but because people accept them as necessary for the public good: the police tell them so, councils tell them so, statistics proclaim it, and so they believe it, and are

perfectly willing to be spied upon, night and day, wherever they go, by unknown, invisible strangers out of sight.

The so-called war on terror is of course the supposed excuse for this appalling violation of all our privacies, together with the ominous rise of the secret intelligence agencies.

The public has been gulled into acceptance of the supervisory state, with all its paraphernalia of surveillance and identity cards, DNA databases, armed police and arbitrary search, by the mantra: "If you don't do anything wrong, why worry?"

Brainwashed by a tabloid press of brilliantly insidious techniques, then, numbed by the relentless mediocrity of television, half the people have willingly forfeited the right to make up their own minds, and mutely accept indoctrination. "He's not afraid of anything," I overheard one young mother say to another, watching her three-year-old clambering over an obstacle, but the reply came straight from the state: "Oh that's dangerous, you must never allow him to think like that."

Even the middle classes, once the very backbone of robust individualism, are not immune to the contagion. They all think twice about expressing their views in case they say something that is politically incorrect. They preposterously mollycoddle their children, not only because they have been so repeatedly warned of life's unspeakable dangers but also because they wonder what the neighbours will think. They are officially encouraged to snoop and sneak on their fellow citizens, so snoop and sneak they do.

And when you are afraid to say what you think, it is a step nearer to the most dreadful condition of all: being afraid of what to think.

As I see it, Davis's display concerns not just political liberty but liberty of the mind, of the identity, of the spirit - even, patriots might sententiously say, of the national soul. It is not simply 800 years of hard-won political rights he is defending, it is nothing less than a view of life itself, which civilised peoples have so pain-stakingly fashioned down the centuries. It has been an old pride of the British that they, above all, have honoured the truest forms of freedom, with all its anomalies, eccentricities and humour, above and beside all politics, obeying only laws they respect.

A few more generations of nagging and surveillance and we shall have forgotten what true freedom is. Young people will have foregone the excitements of risk, academics will temper all thought with caution, and the great public will accept without demur all restrictions and requirements of the state.

Ours will be a people moulded to docility, perfect fodder for ideologues. Then if the one nation of the British slides into autocracy, guided by opportunist or witless politicians and a gullible press, the other nation will be goaded towards despotism too. Already every free soul, I suspect, has sometimes wished that we had a benevolent dictator to sweep all the nonsense aside, the flabbiness and the conformity, the brainwash and all. Some day the structure may crack, and we shall find ourselves under the autocracy of conformists or libertarians - both forced into totalitarianism in defence of their own philosophies.

So perhaps Davis is a prophet as well as a politician. When he talks of habeas corpus he is echoing ideas far older and more profound, reaching back to the earliest yearnings of antiquity, the first glimmerings of human individuality, when our ancestors began to break from tribal disciplines and devise preferences of their own. Tribalism is what every despotism hopes to impose on its people. It is the will of the party, which Davis has apparently flouted. It is the will of the majority, which is one reason why Gordon Brown feels no need to put up a candidate at Haltemprice and Howden. Today the whistleblowers are our guardians of the spirit, and I like to think that Davis is one of them - a true successor of the grand old knight of Castile, but alas, tilting at windmills that are all too real.

· Jan Morris is a historian, travel writer and former Guardian correspondent
janmorris1@msn.com

Liberty sacrificed to politics

The prime minister wants to throw away the rights of the British people for a boost in the polls. It's sad to see him reduced to this

All comments (73)

• 
• • Diane Abbott
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Wednesday June 11, 2008
  • Article history

Over a year ago, quite unprompted, Gordon Brown decided to re-open the question of how long innocent people can be detained without being charged.

Britain already had the longest period of detention without charge in the English speaking world, indeed, in any comparable democracy. Nothing substantive has changed since parliament last debated the issue. The police were not asking for this. (Although some senior policemen, who were mindful of their career prospects, have been "persuaded" to come out in support.) The prosecuting authorities see no need for this. And Ken MacDonald, the director of public prosecutions, has said this publicly. Not a single Labour law officer past or present is prepared to defend the proposal. At first Brown did not suggest a figure. This is a clue that this was not objective evidence-based decision, but rather a wholly speculative political judgment. Finally he hit on the figure of 42 days.

Since then speculation has raged as to why he re-opened this issue. Some people say that he simply wanted to prove that he could do something that Tony Blair could not. (Blair was defeated on 90 days) Others argue that he was upset by an article in the Sun last year that accused him of being "soft" on terror and that this set him rampaging down this path. What is clear is that his burning motivation is to respond to opinion polls and focus groups, as opposed to dealing with facts. He also seeks to gain a tactical advantage over the Tory party by putting them in the "wrong place" on terror.

For a long time Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, and junior ministers sought to argue the case on its merits. But eventually it became clear that the case had no merits, that nobody (except for the most gullible) were taken in by Brown's "concessions" and that he was going to lose the vote in parliament.

At that point the government machinery went into overdrive. At first senior ministers were sent to pressure backbenchers they happened to be friendly with. And the usual array of threats and inducements were rolled out.

Then hapless backbenchers found the prime minister himself on the phone, by turns pleading and insistent. One colleague said to me that the prime minister rang him five times last weekend and he just refused to take the calls because he knew he just could not give him the reply he wanted. He added thoughtfully: "It comes to something when you won't take a prime ministers calls".

One long-time friend and supporter of the prime minister came off the phone from him in tears, because he seemed so lost and out of touch with reality. Backbenchers, who Brown has never spoken to before, found themselves ushered into his presence twice in 48 hours. The level of inducements also went up. Every rebel backbencher with a favourite cause found the prime minister suddenly willing to take action; but only after they voted the right way today.

Good honest colleagues, who know that what the prime minister is doing is wrong, have found the pressure too much to bear and have caved in. Less scrupulous colleagues have decided that a display of unctuous loyalty at this time is the way to secure a job in the coming reshuffle.

Government whips know better than to bribe or bully me and I have been spared the arm-twisting. But my view on this issue has never varied. I came into politics in the 1980s in the era of the Brixton riots when young black men were the "enemy within" in much the same way young Muslim men are today.

The issue of how the state engages with marginalised communities whom the general public fear is at the heart of my politics.

To throw away rights the British people have had since Magna Carta and push the Muslim community further into fear and marginalisation, just in order to gain Gordon Brown a few weeks advantage in the opinion polls would be utterly wrong. I am sad it has come to this for Gordon Brown. But I will be voting against the government tonight.

Q&A: Loss of freedoms?

Who's watching you?

Shadow home secretary David Davis has dramatically quit Parliament the day after the government narrowly won the vote on 42-days detention for terrorism suspects.

Standing on the steps of Westminster, the Tory MP said he would fight a by-election in his own constituency against the "insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms".

So what exactly is he talking about?

DETENTION WITHOUT CHARGE

What did David Davis say?

"Up until yesterday, I took the view that what we did in the House of Commons, representing our constituents, was a noble endeavour because we defended the freedoms of the British people.

"Well we did up until yesterday. Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge."

What's the issue?

David Davis led the Tory opposition to the government's plans to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days without charge. He and other critics say 42-day detention breaches a fundamental right not to be unlawfully detained, enshrined in the Magna Carta.

What does the government say?

Prime Minister Gordon Brown says the move to 42 days is a measured preparation for a time when police may need extra powers in an exceptional situation. He says the public supports it and the safeguards are strong.

CCTV AND SURVEILLANCE

One CCTV camera for every 14 citizens

What did David Davis say?

"A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens."

What's the issue?

Millions have been spent on CCTV cameras, rolled out to deter city centre crime.

The figure quoted by David Davis comes from a guess contained in a fairly old study of cameras in two London streets and is probably an under-estimate of the number of cameras in the UK.

One police officer recently told the BBC, CCTV played a part in solving only 3% of crime.

Many cameras play little law and order role because they were not installed for the police's benefit or are not capable of capturing pictures clear enough to be used in evidence.

However, thanks to software that can read number plates and text and isolate specific human behaviour, their importance is increasing.

Controversial "Talking CCTV" has been installed in some areas, whereby control centre staff can speak to people they are watching, asking them to pick up litter or move on.

What does the government say?

Ministers believe CCTV helps people feel safe but Home Office research casts doubt on whether they genuinely cut crime.

THE DNA DATABASE

What did David Davis say?

"A DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it."

What's the issue?

The national DNA database is extremely controversial, partly because of how easy it is to be added to it and how difficult it can be to get removed.

When it was launched in 1995, only the DNA of convicted criminals could be kept but from 2004 it began holding the DNA of anyone arrested for a recordable offence and detained at a police station.

DNA testing can help solve crimes

As of this spring, the database held 4.5m samples - a greater proportion of the population than any other DNA database in the world.

This includes disproportionate numbers of samples from black men, prompting one senior judge to argue that the only way the system can be made fair is to hold everybody's DNA.

What does the government say?

DNA is a key element of the modern crime-fighting toolkit but there are no plans to cover the entire population.

Of the 200,000 samples from people neither charged nor convicted, which would have in the past been removed, the Home Office says 8,500 had been subsequently matched to crime scenes, involving some 14,000 offences including 114 murders, 55 attempted murders and 116 rapes.

ID CARDS AND DATABASE STATE

What did David Davis say?

"We will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.... The creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers."

What's the issue?

The government's apparent determination to press ahead with a national ID card is one of the most controversial issues in national policy and politics.

ID cards will be gradually phased in

In short, the government wants ID cards as part of plans to fight crime, modernise the state and tackle illegal immigration.

Foreign nationals will soon need to carry a card, followed probably by students, and then others will be encouraged to get a card as a means of making their life easier.

In theory, at some point after 2012 there will be critical mass and Parliament will be asked to make them compulsory.

There are huge concerns over the costs, the practicality of the cards and whether the databases will work and remain secure.

What does the government say? Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told the BBC in March there were "big advantages" to making ID cards as widespread as possible but there needed to be public acceptance.

There have been repeated claims that the government is contemplating a U-turn on ID cards, none of which has been substantiated.

TRIAL BY JURY

What did David Davis say?

"We have witnessed an assault on jury trials - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair."

What's the issue?

There have been several moves to limit the right to a trial by jury over the years, two since 1997.

These include attempts to reform how serious fraud trials are heard, because of the complexity of the evidence. Each attempt has failed in Parliament. Legal observers expect another attempt to reform juries in the near future.

What does the government say?

The government has always denied that it is trying to erode defendants' rights - but argues that reforms and modernisation are necessary in the name of effective justice.

Only this week, one of the country's top judges said the jury system "simply cannot survive" if terrorism cases last as long as 14 months.

Nick Robinson newslog - Wow. Cor blimey. Gordon Bennett.

Laughing off a late life crisis

• Nick
• 12 Jun 08, 05:48 PM

Wow. Cor blimey. Gordon Bennett.

Just some of the repeatable things said round Westminster on hearing the news that David Davis planned to step into the history books by resigning his seat to take the fight for civil liberties to the people.

What David Cameron said in private when he was told - not asked, not consulted, mind you - is probably unbroadcastable.

The two Tory Davids - one who beat the other to become Tory leader - insist they've not fallen out and not rowed about policy.

David Davis has, however, bounced his leader into a by-election he didn't want, on an issue he wanted to move on from and he has done it without consulting his colleagues in the shadow cabinet. It is hard to see how the two men could work comfortably with each other in future.

The man who is already the former shadow home secretary insists he's making a principled stand and laughs off suggestions from friends and foes alike that he's having a late life crisis.

A politician who is a self-confessed adrenalin junkie has just injected a little unpredictability into British politics.

Principled and brave, yes. But Davis still looks an oddball

He could yet be cast as a hero for liberties, but this shock resignation appears histrionic, lacks precision and damages Tory unity

All comments (18)

• 
• • Julian Glover
  • The Guardian,
  • Friday June 13 2008
  • Article history

Some sort of extraordinary brainstorm must have overtaken David Davis on Thursday night, an eruption of emotion that has persuaded him he can become the John Wilkes of the ID card age. His decision to quit the shadow cabinet and parliament - until he is re-elected, as he will be - can be explained by no ordinary political logic. It is as bewildering as a grown man collapsing into tears for what seems no reason; an expression of anguish and a search for attention from inside his soul.

The act is both very brave and very foolish, but either way it is confusing and will have consequences that Davis cannot predict. What it will do for the slow strangulation of British liberties, as he put it in a windblown statement on the steps of the Palace of Westminster after the Speaker meanly refused to allow him to make it in the Commons chamber, is uncertain - perhaps nothing. What it will do for his party is no easier to guess, except to say that it will be taken by Labour as Gordon Brown's best piece of luck in 12 months.

In a culture as monitored as British politics, there is something disturbing about anything done wilfully. Davis's decision has a reckless insanity that carries no sense of strategy - and which might come alive or crash and burn; as yet no one can know. It left his Tory colleagues by turns speechless and furious, an intentional jibe against their authority. It was a break from the collective, a bucking of the herd, an expression of individual freedom made in the cause of defending it.

His struggle will be to explain what he is standing for, and what it is he is against. His complaint is rooted in the government's policy on 42-day detention, but it sprawls much more widely, and risks turning into an individual manifesto rather than a single for-or-against question on an issue of controversial debate. There is a touch of the 18th-century Tory to his talk of lost liberties and Magna Carta, a backwoods defiance of Whiggish modernity in the name of protecting the roast beef and strong ale of old England. Hogarth would have been by his side, William Cobbett too, as well as today's rural protesters crying out about liberty and livelihood - but how is all this to be condensed into a case put to the voters of Haltemprice and Howden in a snap summer poll?

When Enoch Powell and his fellow unionists called byelections against the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1986, they could claim to be asking voters a question on something specific.

The problem is that for all the drama of his campaign, Davis only represents one form of liberty. He does not like the state very much, which other liberals rightly see as a necessary protection against social injustice. He has called for the return of the death penalty, backed section 28, and wants to scrap the Human Rights Act. What exactly is liberal about that? Magna Carta is all very well, but justice in this country depends on more modern protections, which do not all have his support.

How, too, can he expect to commit such an individual act without fracturing the Tory consensus, the preservation of which may prove vital to the 42-day cause he claims to represent? He has no public complaint to make about David Cameron or George Osborne; they voted by his side against 42 days and they have moved their party back into opposition to identity cards, though on the former issue both might have been open to persuasion if the government had attempted to talk them round.

They have been forced to offer tepid support for his move, while describing it as personal, which is the same as saying they would not have done it themselves. They will stick with the policy on 42 days and the new shadow home secretary, Dominic Grieve, will continue the fight as it heads into the House of Lords. But Davis's desertion halfway through makes little sense, unless it has been fuelled by other resentments.

He has behaved well since losing the leadership to Cameron when it looked as though he was certain to get it. There has been no sniff of disloyalty. But he must have been jealous of the younger Etonians who now run the Tories. He may have feared, too, for the party's future intentions on 42 days - although Grieve has confirmed a promise to repeal the law, if passed. There seems to have been no single row; rather yesterday's move was a show of defiance against establishments of all kinds, including the Tory one. The suspicion is that East Yorkshire's voters are being asked to back Davis's re-election without being given a full explanation.

Cameron himself sounded fraught in his statement yesterday. His fury at the way Davis has trampled all over the news is understandable. Cameron's anger may be tempered, though, by the thought that he will no longer need to defer to a leadership rival on home affairs, as Blair once had to leave the economy to Gordon Brown. But the impression of disunity will do damage.

As for other parties, Labour is trying to spoil Davis's day by not standing (hardly brave), while Nick Clegg's decision to do likewise was unavoidable, given he believes Davis's promise to confine his campaign to specifics. But some Lib Dems will hate it. Labour, too, will take note of Clegg's decision to back a Tory against the government, however unusual the circumstances and worthy the cause.

At a time when the political system is distrusted by the public it is supposed to serve more than ever, it may be churlish to pick on one man's desire to be different. Beyond Westminster Davis might become a hero for standing up to the system. He has at least created real drama about real concerns. All the wise heads who yesterday could see the illogicality may be missing the point: illogicality could prove to be the principle glory. And if there is to be a single-issue byelection, how much better it is, too, for it to be fought in defence of justice and individual freedom and not - as some other Tories might - on issues of migration or race.

For that, three cheers. Davis is right about 42 days, right about ID cards, right about the implications of a database-driven surveillance society. If he can explain in specific terms why he is staging this contest, and without lapsing into a little England grumble about all that is wrong with the state, he could yet achieve something magnificent. But the danger is that he will end up looking no more credible than a Fathers for Justice protester dressed in a Superman suit, jumping up and down angrily on Gordon Brown's roof.

julian.glover@guardian.co.uk

In full: Davis statement

IN VIDEO

David Davis' resignation speech



David Davis speaks to Nick Robinson



Here is the full text of the statement David Davis read out to reporters announcing his resignation:

The name of my constituency is Haltemprice and Howden. The word Haltemprice is derived from the motto of a medieval priory, and in Old French it means "Noble Endeavour".

I had always viewed membership of this House as a noble endeavour, not least because we and our forebears have for centuries fiercely defended the fundamental freedoms of our citizens. Or we did, up until yesterday.

Up until yesterday, I took the view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because with centuries or forebears we defended the freedoms of the British people. Well we did up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta - the document that guarantees that most fundamental of British freedoms - Habeus Corpus.

The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason. Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta.

But because the impetus behind this is essentially political - not security - the government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to over-rule the Lords. It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto.

Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least. But purely for political reasons, this government's going to do that. And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away - technology, development and complexity and so on, we'll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.

But in truth, 42 days is just one - perhaps the most salient example - of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.

A CCTV camera for every 14 citiziens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials - that balwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.

And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those who incite violence get off Scot free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped. And for that reason, I feel that today it's incumbent on me to take a stand.

I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

Now I'll not fight it on the government's general record - there's no point repeating Crewe and Nantwich. I won't fight it on my personal record. I am just a piece in this great chess game.

I will fight it, I will argue this by-election, against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government.

Now, that may mean I've made my last speech to the House - it's possible. And of course that would be a matter of deep regret to me. But at least my electorate, and the nation as a whole, would have had the opportunity to debate and consider one of the most fundamental issues of our day - the ever-intrusive power of the state into our lives, the loss of privacy, the loss of freedom and the steady attrition undermining the rule of law.

And if they do send me back here it will be with a single, simple message: that the monstrosity of a law that we passed yesterday will not stand.